So let me summarise the message, the recommendation even, of this article:

Humans, if you don't want to be consigned to the dustbin of history, then brace yourselves, get ready, get set, to... Race The Machine (Professor Skidelsky's classic phrase).

But I still have questions you see, lots of inconvenient questions. Let me pose just a few here.

So for how long do you propose humanity should Race The Machine? Five years? Ten? Twenty? Is it not the case that machines are going to keep getting ever better? Is it also not the case that no matter how much re-training people do, however much life-long learning they engage in, ever larger numbers of people will be forced backwards into ever decreasing circles of activities where humans have any role left all? That final circle looks awfully small to accommodate nine-tenths of humanity, don't you think? And when, despite everything humanity can do to keep up, we get to the point where human input adds no value to machine production and machine decisions, what then?

Information Technology's very raison d'etre is to automate human work. So what will be the net effect of huge numbers of people who lose their livelihoods to automation, themselves re-skilling into IT related professions do you think? Is it not blindingly obvious that this will simply accelerate the automation of any remaining human work so it happens even faster? And having chomped through all unskilled, semi-skilled and repetitive work, why would machine intelligence then not then start immediately encroaching into the very areas you suggest people should move into: social and emotional skills and complex management? And how many people should do this? All Chiefs and no Indians? In an IT team you might have one Chief (who might be an Indian) for every seven or eight Indians (of whom no doubt half will be Indians), but once the Indians are all Chiefs, exactly who will they be managing and to what purpose?

Because there will be jobs for hundreds of millions, produced on the back of those skills. As in, huge tranches of humanity to spend their days being productively 'emotional' on Facebook and Twitter, to justify the UBI they are paid no doubt. Or what else do you have in mind? The Russian troll factory expanding like a tech giant and providing jobs for millions? Or perhaps adopt the Chinese model of employing vast armies of censors?

And what would the homework from an Emotional Skills double lesson look like, I wonder?

First, inaccurate numbers. If 375 million is 14% of the global workforce, then that makes the global workforce 2.68 billion people. The World Bank shows this number to be approaching 3.5 billion out of a total global population of 7.6 billion. But what's a few hundred million between friends?https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN

Second, if the impact if automation is estimated to be just 3-14% by 2030 then what's all the fuss about? Youth unemployment in Spain is 35% *right now*. Why even bother producing an article urging all workers to continually retrain?And the answer is simple: the authors know, as does absolutely everyone familiar with the automation debate, those figures are a gross underestimate. Try sticking an extra zero on the number of people affected by 2030: 750-3750 million people.

As a social scientist with more than 50 years of practical and academic experience, I am concerned about Artificial Intelligence (AI) or here some of those who are living in Ivory Tower and in a fantasy and instant gratification world, they called it "System Transformation" is leading humanity too. I believe they are leading us to more suffering, misery and more mental health crisis which most hospitals cannot cope with endless demands and endless human suffering.

Clearly, the main target is a MAN who has been created by God for a purpose to play a vital role in the life on the earth that is to work. WORK is an honour and dignity to mankind. In Islam work is considered part of worship to Allah Almighty. You are welcome to read my article which I wrote about in 2004 and was published in Malaysia on "Life without work: The Hidden Agenda of Technology" in For Today's Social Ills in www.asnislamicbooks.com.

One lady who works in the disability sector (where my family and I live), her daughter has a severe impairment she told me, please raise this issue in your writing that is: ARE WE, HUMANS, ANY MORE?

For me, most of us are not. What I have seen here for the last two years of suffering make me realised that those they called themselves advanced economies they have nothing to offer to humanity apart from creating wars because it is big business and killing innocents Muslims in Syria, Iraq, Libya but for how long time and history will tell.

You are so right. In the world of new technologies, employees will be under great stress to learn newer technologies. It is not like cooking recipes or methods one can learn from UTube videos! It requires dedication, application of time in the evenings, in trade /technical schools and expenses. A 25 year old person who is a bachelor has greater capacity to learn compared to one with a family, mortgage or say other domestic worries. There is stress, stress and stress! Most of jobs can not be learnt on On the Job Traing!

So, writers write lots of nonsense about the future era and we do not know sufficiently about the new era!

I have bothered to read that the special"report" put out by " ..recent report, the McKinsey Global Institute ..." . Quoted by the authors who are employees of the company. No doubt there is lots of truth. But the glossy report is clever promotion for business !

New Comment

Pin comment to this paragraph

After posting your comment, you’ll have a ten-minute window to make any edits. Please note that we moderate comments to ensure the conversation remains topically relevant. We appreciate well-informed comments and welcome your criticism and insight. Please be civil and avoid name-calling and ad hominem remarks.

Log in/Register

Please log in or register to continue. Registration is free and requires only your email address.

Log in

Register

Emailrequired

PasswordrequiredRemember me?

Please enter your email address and click on the reset-password button. If your email exists in our system, we'll send you an email with a link to reset your password. Please note that the link will expire twenty-four hours after the email is sent. If you can't find this email, please check your spam folder.